Service Please! Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2 Announced

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Running a little restaurant may sound like a calming game idea, but Cook, Serve, Delicious! is merciless. Both Pip and Graham have written about the mounting terror as orders stack up, you switch back and forth from station to station, you’re texting your (virtual) partner, food starts to burn, you’re mashing your (physical) keyboard, customers become unhappy, your buzz fades, and oh no everything’s going wrong.

It’ll all get worse in 2016, as developers Vertigo Gaming have announced Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2 [official site].

CSD!2 will start you back over from scratch in a new tower, building a new café back up to a five-star restaurant. Check out a few of the recipes you’ll prepare.

If you missed the first one, CSD is a hectic take on cooking games. You’ll need to prepare and combine ingredients, cook them to the right degree, and customise them to each customer’s order. But you might be serving four customers at once. Or five. Or oh no these orders keep coming in. And then the toilets need cleaning, or the bins taking out. It’s about juggling priorities, and once you get into the flow your fingers are hitting the hotkeys for each action without thinking. It’s also got a management side, buying new equipment and better ingredients, and picking up new recipes, to become a classier joint and climb the rankings. You need to handle your ‘buzz’ too, shaking menus up to stay fresh and exciting. It’s a right lark.

the first is difficult as hell- wasnt good at it either. :D
would love if someone would make a cooking simulator that is somewhat more relaxed and specially one that would let you make your own food creations…. like in “Pizza Syndicate” from back then. that was an awesome game.

So hyped and excited, but I have some concerns on this being a reskin of the first game. While I love CSD, and while this looks massive (180 foods vs. the 20 original + 10 advanced) I’m concerned that it’ll play out just like the first one.

Hopefully this time the food is better designed. One of the problems of the first is that some recipes were too complicated for little to no difference in profit with others that were easier to make. Point: the soup.

I hated soup, too. I actually gave up the game after a while, though. I got up to 4 stars, and just said it’s too much. Making soup would have been nuts then. There was another one I found too hard, too, but I think I’m just repressing now, and I don’t want to return to the nightmare. I did have fun for the first few stars.

I don’t know about other games in the genre, but with CSD, there’s just something satisfying about knowing all the patterns and being able to slap everything together quickly and properly. I think it tickles the same itch as something like VVVVVV, actually, in that it requires getting into a slightly zen state of mind and really engaging your hand\eye coordination.

Honestly, I wouldn’t call CSD a time management game. It’s mostly an action/puzzle game. There is some small element of time management, but really, it’s mostly about just getting orders out as quickly as physically possible.